Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near, their function expanded to gratify his obsession (and that of Reichsführer Himmler, as head of the SS which administered them) with ‘purifying the race’ by getting rid of gypsies, Jews, ‘asocials’ — prostitutes, criminals, vagabonds — as well as the mentally ill and handicapped. An all-female camp at Ravensbrück, set up in 1938, soon afforded the prison doctors a steady supply of women — the ‘rabbits’, as these prisoners became known — for medical experiments .

After war broke out in September 1939, Resistance fighters from France and other occupied countries and captured enemy agents joined the prisoner populations. Ravensbrück women, as much-needed slave labour, were worked to death in satellite camps, employed by prominent industrial firms. Siemens, the electrical engineers, had a factory adjoining Ravensbrück.

Ravensbrück, a small lakeside village 50 miles north of Berlin, was far from any major centre where it might attract unwelcome public criticism.